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Quattrocento
Italian for "four hundred" — shorthand for the 1400s (the 15th century) and the early Renaissance it produced. Leonardo was born in 1452 and trained entirely within the Quattrocento; his mature work in Milan from 1482 onward bridges the early and high Renaissance.
Definition
Quattrocento (Italian: "four hundred," short for mil quattrocento = 1400s) designates the 15th century and, in art history, the early Renaissance that flourished within it. The convention parallels Trecento (1300s, Giotto and Cimabue), Cinquecento (1500s, the High Renaissance of Michelangelo, Raphael, and Leonardo's maturity), and Seicento (1600s, Baroque).
The Quattrocento World Leonardo Entered
Leonardo was born in 1452 and entered Verrocchio's workshop in Florence around 1466 — at the height of Quattrocento artistic achievement. Key features of that world:
- Medici patronage: Florence under Lorenzo de' Medici (1469–92) was the cultural capital of Italy
- Linear perspective: Brunelleschi's invention (c. 1420) had transformed architectural and figural painting; Alberti codified it in Della Pittura (1435)
- Classical revival: Ancient sculpture, coins, and texts were being collected, studied, and imitated
- Humanist scholarship: Greek texts were arriving in Italy from Byzantine Constantinople (fallen 1453) — the year after Leonardo's birth
- Botticelli, Ghirlandaio, Perugino — contemporaries in Verrocchio's orbit, all trained within the same Florentine Quattrocento tradition
Leonardo as Transition
Leonardo is often described as the first painter of the High Renaissance (Cinquecento), but his training and early work are entirely Quattrocento. His revolutionary paintings of the 1480s and 1490s — Virgin of the Rocks, Last Supper, Lady with an Ermine — represent the Quattrocento transforming itself into something new.